Alan Marti didn't manage to get a wink of sleep that night.
He spent hours scrolling through TikTok. He kept wondering when exactly he had trained his algorithm so that every damn clip that showed up on his feed starred Crust.
One after another:
Crust in slow motion with sensual Doja Cat songs while shaking out his wavy hair, then suddenly looking into the camera in silence, forming a smile before saying,
"I won again, can you believe it?"
Crust playing a video game while recording himself live — how insanely good he was at shooting in Fortnite, how elite he was — while making jokes about his pecs and about how his genetics were so good because of his Caribbean blood.
"But I have Caribbean blood too," he muttered.
"And closer than his," he repeated, mocking Crust's words.
He stayed silently watching another clip.
Crust in San Francisco, showing his booty on television.
He thought, yeah, after all, he probably did have good genetics — how else did he get that bubble butt so fast if he had only been going to the gym for seven months? He had been going for much longer and—
"Well," he thought, "at least I've had a big booty even before going to the gym. If that's not good genetics, I don't know what people think is."
A like slipped out.
He removed it instantly, but then he watched the video again — exactly the part where Crust said,
"Now second place is actually worth it,"
and he gave the like back.
He genuinely liked the clip. It would be awful not to at least admit that.
He went into the comments and started reading them one by one; each one seemed even funnier than the last.
"Crust will never be the most handsome in SS20 while Alan Marti is there," one of them said.
He wondered if people really believed he was more handsome — and to his surprise, yes: that video, and almost every one where Crust appeared, was full of comments like that, saying he really was more handsome.
He liked several videos — really, several.
On Instagram too; he did it many, many times.
"This won't work if I want my feed to de-Crustify itself," he thought.
He truly tried to sleep.
When he realized it was impossible, he gave up.
There was something that was going to make him sleep peacefully — we all know what it is, don't think about it too much.
He went into the hot shower, and when he came out he was much more relaxed.
Before going to bed, he stayed a while looking at himself in the mirror, inspecting every part of himself, and honestly, he really liked what he saw.
It was close to four in the morning when he finally fell asleep; it was nine when he woke up — much less tired than he expected.
"Ready for the race?" the press asked him.
He could already tell this press was much more chill than the SS20 press he was used to, and he thought it was great that they spoke Spanish.
"Yes, I already need to get in the car. I miss my beast," he said, and people laughed fondly when they heard him.
"Have you noticed that everyone hugs you?" they said.
You could tell it was Spanish press.
The boy smiled in an innocent way before trying to answer.
"I don't know... whenever they get the chance they hug me, and between themselves they barely even shake hands."
No one present could contain the tenderness.
He himself noticed it.
The SS20 guys were sitting in the VIP area, and fans came up to them before the race just to say hello and ask for autographs.
Alan Martin wasn't even surprised when he saw dozens of fans — even kids — approaching Crust.
Valentino had a phone recording a boy who kept shouting "Crust" over and over in a very funny way; you could see how much he admired him.
That clip spread like wildfire, especially the part where the boy shouted so loudly that even Crust himself got scared, and everyone repeated that same part everywhere.
His scared face became a recurring meme everywhere.
Then there was the second meme: when Crust gave the boy a soft, affectionate tap on the chest, and the kid jumped up to wrap his arms around him, and Crust got emotional — you could see it on his cute face.
Alan also received quite a lot of attention.
Of course Crust received more — it was his city, more people knew him — but you could see how Alan's fans seemed to care for him a lot, much more than his fans in Barcelona, who only pressured him as if not breaking a world record were the only thing that mattered to them.
A little girl approached Alan and gave him a flower that looked like she had picked it herself.
The boy looked at her with tenderness, with his shy inverted smile, before she ran away, shy.
"In five minutes the race begins," the narrator said over the speakers.
Everyone was screaming so loudly that no one could hear anything anymore, but it was obvious the most anticipated race was about to begin.
The twenty cars lined up on the grid.
Alan Marti was surprised to see so few cars — only ten teams. They were used to seeing twenty teams.
In the end it made sense: "Self-Seat 10" meant that only ten teams competed; "Self-Seat 20" meant twenty teams.
There was even SS30, the world league directly below SS20.
Those three were the international leagues of the sport.
Then came the regional leagues: NP North America (National Pool North America), and the national leagues like NP-USA, NP-Canada, NP-Spain, etc.
There was also NP-StarsLeague, the European league.
The whole system worked through hierarchies, and teams moved up levels.
Sometimes it wasn't necessary to ascend directly into the higher league: teams could move up according to the rules of GOT (Game of Tie-breaker), which decided which teams advanced when world leagues overlapped.
The system worked like this:
If the teams that won SS10 and SS20 were from the same country, no GOT was required.
The SS10 team kept its place in SS10, and the SS20 team remained in SS20.
Winning SS10 made its position in the league undisputable.
If the team that lost SS10 and the team that won SS20 were from the same country, there was also no GOT.
The team that lost SS10 was eliminated, and its place was taken directly by the SS20 champion.
If the team that won SS20 came from a country with no representation in SS10, the team that lost SS10 was directly replaced by the SS20 winner.
However, if the SS20 winner belonged to a country that did have representation in SS10, and that team was neither the winner nor the loser of SS10, then a GOT was triggered.
The GOT was a direct head-to-head race between the two teams.
The winner advanced to SS10 and the loser dropped to SS20.
In that scenario, the team that had lost SS10 was eliminated, leaving SS10 with only nine teams.
When SS10 had nine available spots, the Pre-Prix was activated:
SS20 teams without representation in SS10 competed for the open position.
The Pre-Prix took place before the Premier Prix, and the team that won it claimed the remaining spot in SS10.
The same system applied to the lower leagues as well.
There could be multiple Pre-Prix winners, depending on how many teams had been eliminated.
In SS10 there was almost always at most one eliminated team, but in SS20 and SS30 there could be more than one.
At this moment, the situation was like this:
If the Spanish team lost the race and finished in last place, Team Lynx would take its position in SS10.
If Spain did not finish last, then both Spanish teams would have to go to a GOT to decide which one stayed.
And since SS10 would then have only nine teams after that, the SS20 teams without representation in the Prime League would have to compete in a Pre-Prix to occupy the open spot.
That's why the sport was so complex, so full of chaos, and so addictive.